Course Title: Writing What We Love ***CLASS IS FULL**** Email to be added to wait list: info@oxygenartcentre.org
Course description: What we love is our greatest teacher and can organize a poem’s meaning, line, sound, structure, and imagery. Writing what we love also makes us vulnerable. Response to work produced in the workshop will be guided by Rainer Maria Rilke’s advice: ” “Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.” We are all beginners— prior experience welcome but not necessary.
Instructor: Susan Andrews Grace
Location: Oxygen Art Centre, 320 Vernon St
6 classes: April 2 – May 7
5.30 – 7:30 pm Wednesdays
Course fee: $150 + HST
Or by Phone: 250 352 2821
Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing to be so little appreciated as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and fairly judge them.
–Rainer Maria Rilke
William Blake, William Butler Yeats, and Jack Spicer said that poems came from what Spicer called the Outside. What we love is a kind of “outside.” It gives us many clues as to what we might want to create. What you love can become a “skeleton” of what you might build yourself. Love makes life more juicy and easy and fun. Poems you love also makes writing easier and juicier and much more fun.
What we love is our best teacher. Poetry we love, even if we are not head over heels in love, will teach us much about how to write, about why we might want to write and about how to find our own voice. It is said that you must write a million words before you will find your voice as a writer. Many poets have doubled up on that and copied poems they love by hand so that the form of the poem is remembered by the brain, eyes, ears and the hand. Ironically, it is usually the love of poetry by others that helps us develop our own authentic voice as poets.
This workshop will encourage you to read poems first for what you love or admire and second, with an eye to developing your own craft. We will look at some theory/poetics. Through reading silently and reading aloud for pleasure, writing to articulate what you like, you will form a thesis for yourself about what you want to write. In this process you will save yourself self-consciousness in composition and come to see with fresh eyes.
The formal response to your study will be in your own writing. There will be presentation and discussion of the basics of poetry to remind you what to look for such as imagery, line, sound, idea. You will have the opportunity to examine your poems for these basics. The class will give you feedback on what similarities and differences there are between what you love and what you write.
A workshop in creative writing comes out of the tradition of writers meeting with other writers, for feedback about their new work. A workshop is the ultimate experience in collaborative learning. It requires maturity and dedication. Please remember the Golden Rule: treat your peer’s manuscript with the care and attention that you would wish yours to receive.
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